Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  The third was the Mechanical Soldier, who manifested as a suit of armor inside which lights blinked on-off, on-off, in digital splendor. Seran was buying more wine—you could usually get your hands on some, even during the occupation, if your standards were low—when he heard the clink-clank thunder outside the dim room where the transaction was taking place. The Mechanical Soldier carried a black sword, which proved capable of cutting through metal and crystal and stone. With great precision it carved a window in the wall. The blinking lights brightened as it regarded Seran.

  The wine-seller shrieked and dropped one of the bottles, to Seran’s dismay. The air was pungent with the wine’s sour smell. Seran looked unflinchingly at the helmet, although a certain amount of flinching was undoubtedly called for, and after a while the Mechanical Soldier went away in search of its real target.

  It turned out that the Mechanical Soldier liked to carve cartouches into walls, or perhaps its coat-of-arms. Whenever it struck down Jaian’s soldiers, lights sparked in the carvings, like sourceless eyes. People began leaving offerings by the carvings: oil-of-massacres, bouquets of crystals with fissures in their shining hearts, cardamom bread. (Why cardamom, Seran wasn’t sure. At least the aroma was pleasing.) Jaian’s soldiers executed people they caught at these makeshift shrines, but the offerings kept coming.

  Seran had laid in a good supply of wine, but after the Mechanical General shuddered apart into pixels and blackened reticulations, there was a maddening period of calm. He waited for the warden’s summons.

  No summons came.

  Jaian’s soldiers swaggered through the streets again, convinced that there would be no more apparitions. The city’s people whispered to each other that they must have faith. The offerings increased in number.

  Finding wine became too difficult, so Seran gave it up. He was beginning to think that he had dreamed up the whole endeavor when the effigy nights started again.

  Imulai Mokarengen suddenly became so crowded with effigies that Seran’s othersight of fire and smoke was not much different from reality. He had not known that the city contained so many stories: Women with deadly hands and men who sang atrocity-hymns. Colonial intelligences that wove webs across the pitted buildings and flung disease-sparks at the invaders. A cannon that rose up out of the city’s central plaza and roared forth red storms.

  But Jaian of the Burning Orb wasn’t a fool. She knew that the effigies, for all their destructiveness, burned out eventually. She and her soldiers retreated beneath their force-domes and waited.

  Seran resolved to do some research. How did the warden mean to win her war, if she hadn’t yet managed it?

  By now he had figured out that the effigies would not harm him, although he still had the scar the Saint of Guns had given him. It would have been easy to remove the scar, but he was seized by the belief that the scar was his protection.

  He went first to a bookstore in which candles burned and cogs whirred. Each candle had the face of a child. A man with pale eyes sat in an unassuming metal chair, shuffling cards. “I thought you were coming today,” he said.

  Seran’s doubts about fortunetelling clearly showed on his face. The man laughed and fanned out the cards face-up. Every one of them was blank. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said, “but they only tell you what you already know.”

  “I need a book about the Saint of Guns,” Seran said. She had been the first. No reason not to start at the beginning.

  “That’s not a story I know,” the man said. His eyes were bemused. “I have a lot of books, if you want to call them that, but they’re really empty old journals. People like them for the papers, the bindings. There’s nothing written in them.”

  “I think I have what I came for,” Seran said, hiding his alarm. “I’m sorry to trouble you.”

  He visited every bookstore in the district, and some outside of it, and his eyes ached abominably by the end. It was the same story at all of them. But he knew where he had to go next.

  ***

  Getting into the South Archive meant hiring a thief-errant, whose name was Izeut. Izeut had blinded Seran for the journey, and it was only now, inside one of the reading rooms, that Seran recovered his vision. He suspected he was happier not knowing how they had gotten in. His stomach still felt as though he’d tied it up in knots.

  Seran had had no idea what the Archive would look like inside. He had especially not expected the room they had landed in to be welcoming, the kind of place where you could curl up and read a few novels while sipping citron tea. There were couches with pillows, and padded chairs, and the paintings on the walls showed lizards at play.

  “All right,” Izeut said. His voice was disapproving, but Seran had almost beggared himself paying him, so the disapproval was very faint. “What now?”

  “All the books look like they’re in place here,” Seran said. “I want to make sure there’s nothing obviously missing.”

  “That will take a while,” Izeut said. “We’d better get started.”

  Not all the rooms were welcoming. Seran’s least favorite was the one from which sickles hung from the ceiling, their tips gleaming viscously. But all the bookcases were full.

  Seran still wasn’t satisfied. “I want to look inside a few of the books,” he said.

  Izeut shot him a startled glance. “The city’s traditions—”

  “The city’s traditions are already dying,” Seran said.

  “The occupation is temporary,” Izeut said stoutly. “We just have to do more to drive out the warlord’s people.”

  Izeut had no idea. “Humor me,” Seran said. “Haven’t you always wanted to see what’s in those books?” Maybe an appeal to curiosity would work better.

  Whether it did or not, Izeut stood silently while Seran pulled one of the books off the shelves. He hesitated, then broke the book’s seal and felt the warden’s black kiss, cold, unsentimental, against his lips. I’m already cursed, he thought, and opened the covers.

  The first few pages were fine, written in a neat hand with graceful swells. Seran flipped to the middle, however, and his breath caught. The pages were empty except for a faint dust-trace of distorted graphemes and pixellated stick figures.

  He could have opened up more books to check, but he had already found his answer.

  “Stop,” Izeut said sharply. “Let me reshelve that.” He took the book from Seran, very tenderly.

  “It’s no use,” Seran said.

  Izeut didn’t turn around; he was slipping the book into its place. “We can go now.”

  It was too late. The general’s soldiers had caught them.

  ***

  Seran was separated from Izeut and brought before Jaian of the Burning Orb. She regarded him with cool exasperation. “There were two of you,” she said, “but something tells me that you’re the one I should worry about.”

  She kicked the table next to her. All of Seran’s surgical tools, which the soldiers had confiscated and laid out in disarray, clattered.

  “I have nothing to say to you,” Seran said through his teeth.

  “Really,” Jaian said. “You fancy yourself a patriot, then. We may disagree about the petty legal question of who the owner of this city is, but if you are any kind of healer, you ought to agree with me that these constant spasms of destruction are good for no one.”

  “You could always leave,” Seran said.

  She picked up one of his sets of tweezers and clicked it once, twice. “You will not understand this,” she said, “and it is even right that you will not understand this, given your profession, but I will try to explain. This is what I do. Worlds are made to be pressed for their wine, cities taste of fruit when I bite them open. I cannot let go of my conquests.

  “Do you think I am ignorant of the source of the apparitions that leave their smoking shadows in the streets? You’re running out of writings. All I need do is wait, and this city will yield in truth.”

  “You’re right,” Seran said. “I don’t understand you at a
ll.”

  Jaian’s smile was like knives and nightfall. “I’ll write this in a language you do understand, then. You know something about how this is happening, who’s doing it. Take me to them or I will start killing your people in earnest. Every hour you make me wait, I’ll drop a bomb, or send out tanks, or soldiers with guns. If I get bored I’ll get creative.”

  Seran closed his eyes and made himself breathe evenly. He didn’t think she was bluffing. Besides, there was a chance—if only a small chance—that the warden could come up with a defense against the general; that the effigies would come to her aid once the general came within reach.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll take you where it began.”

  ***

  Seran was bound with chains-of-suffocation, and he thought it likely that there were more soldiers watching him than he could actually spot. He led Jaian to the secret library, to the maze-of-mists.

  “A warden,” Jaian said. “I knew some of them had escaped.”

  They went to the staircase and descended slowly, slowly. The candle-sprites flinched from the general. Their light was almost violet, like dusk.

  All the way down the stairs they heard the snick-snick of many scissors.

  The downstairs room, when they reached it, was filled with paper. Curling scraps and triangles crowded the floor. It was impossible to step anywhere without crushing some. The crumpling sound put Seran in mind of burnt skin.

  Come to that, there was something of that smell in the room, too.

  All through the room there were scissors snapping at empty space, wielded by no hand but the hands of the air, shining and precise.

  At the far end of the room, behind a table piled high with more paper scraps, was the warden. She was standing sideways, leaning heavily against the table, and her face was averted so that her shoulder-length hair fell around it.

  “It’s over,” Jaian called out. “You may as well surrender. It’s folly to let you live, but your death doesn’t have to be one of the ugly ones.”

  Seran frowned. Something was wrong with the way the warden was moving, more like paper fluttering than someone breathing. But he kept silent. A trap, he thought, let it be a trap.

  Jaian’s soldiers attempted to clear a path through the scissors, but the scissors flew to either side and away, avoiding the force-bolts with uncanny grace.

  Jaian’s long strides took her across the room and around the table. She tipped the warden’s face up, forced eye contact. If there had been eyes.

  Seran started, felt the chains-of-suffocation clot the breath in his throat. At first he took the marks all over the warden’s skin to be tattoos. Then he saw that they were holes cut into the skin, charred black at the edges. Some of the marks were logographs, and alphabet letters, and punctuation stretched wide.

  “Stars and fire ascending,” Jaian breathed, “what is this?”

  Too late she backed away. There was a rustling sound, and the warden unfurled, splitting down the middle with a jagged tearing sound, a great irregular sheet punched full of word-holes, completely hollowed out. Her robe crumpled into fine sediment, revealing the cutout in her back in the shape of a serpent-headed youth.

  Jaian made a terrible crackling sound, like paper being ripped out of a book. She took one step back toward Seran, then halted. Holes were forming on her face and hands. The scissors closed in on her.

  I did this, Seran thought, I should have refused the warden. She must have learned how to call forth effigies on her own, ripping them out of Imulai Mokarengen’s histories and sagas and legends, animating the scissors to make her work easier. But when the scissors ran out of paper, they turned on the warden. Having denuded the city of its past, of its weight of stories, they began cutting effigies from the living stories of its people. And now Jaian was one of those stories, too.

  Seran left Jaian and her soldiers to their fate and began up the stairs. But some of the scissors had already escaped, and they had left the doors to the library open. They were undoubtedly in the streets right now. Soon the city would be full of holes, and people made of paper slowly burning up, and the hungry sound of scissors.

  Ghostweight, by Yoon Ha Lee

  For Charibdys

  It is not true that the dead cannot be folded. Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth.

  What the paper-folding diagrams fail to mention is that each fold enacts itself upon the secret marrow of your ethics, the axioms of your thoughts.

  Whether this is the most important thing the diagrams fail to mention is a matter of opinion.

  ***

  "There's time for one more hand," Lisse's ghost said. It was composed of cinders of color, a cipher of blurred features, and it had a voice like entropy and smoke and sudden death. Quite possibly it was the last ghost on all of ruined Rhaion, conquered Rhaion, Rhaion with its devastated, shadowless cities and dead moons and dimming sun. Sometimes Lisse wondered if the ghost had a scar to match her own, a long, livid line down her arm. But she felt it was impolite to ask.

  Around them, in a command spindle sized for fifty, the walls of the war-kite were hung with tatters of black and faded green, even now in the process of reknitting themselves into tapestry displays. Tangled reeds changed into ravens. One perched on a lightning-cloven tree. Another, taking shape amid twisted threads, peered out from a skull's eye socket.

  Lisse didn't need any deep familiarity with mercenary symbology to understand the warning. Lisse's people had adopted a saying from the Imperium's mercenaries: In raven arithmetic, no death is enough.

  Lisse had expected pursuit. She had deserted from Base 87 soon after hearing that scouts had found a mercenary war-kite in the ruins of a sacred maze, six years after all the mercenaries vanished: suspicious timing on her part, but she would have no better opportunity for revenge. The ghost had not tried too hard to dissuade her. It had always understood her ambitions.

  For a hundred years, despite being frequently outnumbered, the mercenaries in their starfaring kites had cindered cities, destroyed flights of rebel starflyers, shattered stations in the void's hungry depths. What better weapon than one of their own kites?

  What troubled her was how lightly the war-kite had been defended. It had made a strange, thorny silhouette against the lavender sky even from a long way off, like briars gone wild, and with the ghost as scout she had slipped past the few mechanized sentries. The kite's shadow had been human. She was not sure what to make of that.

  The kite had opened to her like a flower. The card game had been the ghost's idea, a way to reassure the kite that she was its ally: Scorch had been invented by the mercenaries.

  Lisse leaned forward and started to scoop the nearest column, the Candle Column, from the black-and-green gameplay rug. The ghost forestalled her with a hand that felt like the dregs of autumn, decay from the inside out. In spite of herself, she flinched from the ghostweight, which had troubled her all her life. Her hand jerked sideways; her fingers spasmed.

  "Look," the ghost said.

  Few cadets had played Scorch with Lisse even in the barracks. The ghost left its combinatorial fingerprints in the cards. People drew the unlucky Fallen General's Hand over and over again, or doubled on nothing but negative values, or inverted the Crown Flower at odds of thousands to one. So Lisse had learned to play the solitaire variant, with jerengjen as counters. You must learn your enemy's weapons, the ghost had told her, and so, even as a child in the reeducation facility, she had saved her chits for paper to practice folding into cranes, lilies, leaf-shaped boats.

  Next to the Candle Column she had folded stormbird, greatfrog, lantern, drake. Where the ghost had interrupted her attempt to clear the pieces, they had landed amid the Sojourner and Mirror Columns, forming a skewed late-game configuration: a minor variant of the Needle Stratagem, missing only its pivot.

  "Consider it an omen," the ghost said. "Even the smallest sliver can kill, as they say."

 
There were six ravens on the tapestries now. The latest one had outspread wings, as though it planned to blot out the shrouded sun. She wondered what it said about the mercenaries, that they couched their warnings in pictures rather than drums or gongs.

  Lisse rose from her couch. "So they're coming for us. Where are they?"

  She had spoken in the Imperium's administrative tongue, not one of the mercenaries' own languages. Nevertheless, a raven flew from one tapestry to join its fellows in the next. The vacant tapestry grayed, then displayed a new scene: a squad of six tanks caparisoned in Imperial blue and bronze, paced by two personnel carriers sheathed in metal mined from withered stars. They advanced upslope, pebbles skittering in their wake.

  In the old days, the ghost had told her, no one would have advanced through a sacred maze by straight lines. But the ancient walls, curved and interlocking, were gone now. The ghost had drawn the old designs on her palm with its insubstantial fingers, and she had learned not to shudder at the untouch, had learned to thread the maze in her mind's eye: one more map to the things she must not forget.

  "I'd rather avoid fighting them," Lisse said. She was looking at the command spindle's controls. Standard Imperial layout, all of them—it did not occur to her to wonder why the kite had configured itself thus—but she found nothing for the weapons.

  "People don't bring tanks when they want to negotiate," the ghost said dryly. "And they'll have alerted their flyers for intercept. You have something they want badly."

  "Then why didn't they guard it better?" she demanded.

  Despite the tanks' approach, the ghost fell silent. After a while, it said, "Perhaps they didn't think anyone but a mercenary could fly a kite."

  "They might be right," Lisse said darkly. She strapped herself into the commander's seat, then pressed three fingers against the controls and traced the commands she had been taught as a cadet. The kite shuddered, as though caught in a hell-wind from the sky's fissures. But it did not unfurl itself to fly.